Kyle
The big German shepherd helped her cope with her experiences in the military, she explained to Kyle’s parents. Maybe he could help their son.
They invited her in. Sheehan wound up staying in Parkland for three weeks, spending all her time with Kyle and other students who had been hurt in the shooting. When she returned to Vermont, she gave the teen her phone number and told him to use it whenever he needed.
Shortly after Kyle came home from the hospital, when he was still sleeping on a cot in the living room because he couldn’t walk up stairs, he called in a panic.
“Walk me through what happened,” Sheehan said.
Everyone else had gone to sleep. He had turned off his video game. And then it was quiet.
“Do you remember, was it quiet right before the shooting?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she reassured him. “Your brain is trying to keep you alive and it’s going to take random things from that day and react to them. So how can we make it not quiet?”
The next day she called Marie and explained, and the Lamans put a noisy fan next to Kyle’s bed.
“Can’t you be my counselor?” Kyle asked Sheehan. “You’re the only one I can talk to.”
“That broke my heart a little bit,” Sheehan recalls. But it’s why she keeps coming back.
At the end of April, Sheehan flies to Parkland to help Kyle pick up his new service dog—a German shepherd, like Cooper.
A crowd gathers at the concrete loading dock of the Fort Lauderdale airport cargo center— friends, camera-toting reporters, public-relations staffers from the nonprofit group that provided his dog. There’s a chorus of coos as the 14-week-old puppy emerges from its plastic crate, all big brown eyes and oversize feet.
The dog’s legs are trembling, and Kyle rubs its head reassuringly. “Bruce,” he says—the name given by the dog’s trainers.
It is hot in the parking lot. The cameras follow boy and dog everywhere they go. Sheehan recognizes Kyle’s unhappy squint. “We should go home,” she announces.
Kyle hustles back to the car as fast as his boot will allow. He and Bruce have already clambered inside when one of the PR women asks to get a picture of the whole family.
The teenager reluctantly acquiesces.
But in the car, finally alone, he is incandescent. He wraps his arms around his puppy, touching his nose to its wet one.
“He likes me already,” he tells his father.
Bruce pees on the carpet within 20 minutes of arriving at the Lamans’ home. Marie is exasperated—“I need another dog like I need a hole in my head,” she mutters.
It doesn’t dampen Kyle’s mood. Curled up on the couch with his puppy, he croons: “I love you. You’re beautiful, bubba.”
Marie sits beside him. He looks up.
“He’s got such a nice smell,” he tells Marie.
She slides over, closer to her son.
“He’s cute,” she says. “He’s so lovable.”
“Yeah.”
Marie puts her arm around Kyle. “So now you’ll be happy?”
Sunny Florida spring turns to stormy summer. Kyle undergoes a fifth surgery and switches from a boot to a brace. Bruce grows into his big paws and overlong legs. And life hasn’t gotten any easier. Kyle refuses to go to his physical-therapy appointment, even though they just missed one because Marie lost track of what day of the week it was. Mya wants to sleep over at a friend’s house, but her parents won’t let her.
“I don’t feel comfortable,” Marie says. “Just stay home. It’s safe.”
Franz is pulling 10-hour days at the car dealership—“If there’s no work, there’s no money”—and trying not to feel guilty that he can’t spend more time at home.
Kyle keeps forgetting to walk Bruce, and the puppy has peed on the carpet so many times the Lamans decide to rip it up and replace it with a wooden floor.
“He’s a pain in the ass,” Kyle says of the dog.
“Give me strength,” Marie says of her son.
“It’s a new kind of hard,” Sheehan says of the family, when she flies back to Florida over Memorial Day to check in on Kyle and the puppy. The reality of what happened is finally sinking in: This is now their normal.
Certain things begin to make sense. The way Kyle asks whether they can order takeout instead of going out for their family dinners. His strange new fascination with zombie apocalypses and flesh-eating bacteria.
He doesn’t like being in public, with all those people looking at him, Franz realizes.
He’s afraid of dying, Marie says. The starkest realization comes when the Broward County Sheriff’s Office releases an animation of how the shooting unfolded. In it, a black dot representing the gunman moves methodically through the hallways of Stoneman Douglas’s Building 12. Green dots representing students and blue ones for teachers turn yellow as they are struck by bullets.
The dots change to purple when someone dies.
Watching it, Franz and Marie finally piece together what happened to their son that day.
Kyle had been in study hall when the fire alarm sounded. In the animation, the boy is just one of a cluster of green dots that leave the classroom and flood the third-floor hallway. Then the black dot emerges from the stairwell.
Most of the green dots flee, others turn yellow, and Marie recalls what her son has told her about the moment he was shot. The way the crowded hallway suddenly cleared, leaving Kyle directly in the gunman’s line of sight. The way the 15-year-old, primed by years in the Airsoft arena, dove toward an alcove as the man in black fired.
Here the dots become hard to follow. But Franz knows that two others hid in the alcove with Kyle—his friend Tyler and a third boy who had been shot in the knee. He knows that Kyle told the others they needed to leave, but the other injured student couldn’t walk, and try as they might, the two boys couldn’t lift him.
So Tyler and Kyle ran. Fueled by adrenaline that overpowered his pain, Kyle raced past bodies and bloodstained walls, down three flights of stairs, out of the building and across a field, where he finally stumbled into an off-duty police officer, Sgt. Jeff Heinrich, who bandaged his wounds and got him to the EMTs.
In the animation, the black dot returns to the alcove where Kyle had been hiding. And the yellow dot that remained there—the boy who couldn’t run—changes to purple.
“He executed that kid,” Franz says. “That was horrible.”
But what happened to Kyle is its own kind of horrible, Franz continues: “People think it’s just his foot. But he has to live with that.”
A trauma therapist starts making weekly visits to the house. She talks with Kyle for one, two hours—as long as he needs.
Kyle doesn’t always tell Marie what he discusses with the counselor. But she can tell it’s helping him.
“We’re figuring things out,” Marie says.
In July a local pastor calls Marie and says his church raised money to pay for Kyle and Mya to attend a week-long water-sports camp. The summer camp’s owner specially adjusts a wakeboard to fit around Kyle’s injured leg.
On the third day, he is finally able to knee-board.
“Mom!” he tells Marie at pickup. “I did it.”
In that moment, he sounds just like the old Kyle.
Still, Marie worries. She worries about the two additional surgeries awaiting her son. She worries about his mood swings, his loneliness, whether he is miserable. She worries about what happens next school year, when he has to go back full time.
She worries about the upcoming trial for the accused gunman. It’s so hard for the 15-year-old to talk about the attack or think about the person who shot him and killed his friends. But Kyle will probably have to testify, since prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. “I want him to die,” the boy says.
And Marie worries about the news that keeps breaking like a recurring nightmare: Ten dead in a shooting at a high school in Texas. Five killed in a shooting at a newspaper in Maryland.
“It’s nonstop,” she says. “What is wrong with the world?”
Some of the other parents the Lamans know have joined safety commissions, raised funds for memorials, flown to Washington to fight for stricter gun laws.
She’s glad they’re doing it, she says, and grateful.
But it’s not something she can be a part of.
“Our fight is at home,” she says. “Our fight is helping our son heal. And it’s never ending.”